3D print service turns children's drawings into sculptures

If sticking drawings to a fridge won't do, parents of pint-sized
Picassos can put their child's art on a pedestal by having it 3D
printed through a new service called CrayonCreatures.

The service is the invention of Bernat Cuni, a Spanish
designer working in Barcelona with a focus on emerging 3D printing
applications. "The idea came one morning when my daughter asked me
to make one of her drawings as a toy with my DIY 3D printer, and I
did it," says Cuni. "She was totally satisfied with a monochrome
plastic version of her drawing, but I wasn't. I felt that something
was lost in the translation from drawing to thing. That was the
colour, the scratches of crayon that make a child's drawing so
unique and expressiveness were lost.

Cuni revised the process to add full-colour printouts, and in
turn, launched CrayonCreatures to help others do the same. The
system is simple: The drawings of a diminutive Degas are scanned,
interpreted by an artist at CrayonCreatures, and a full-colour
print is produced on a ZCorp 3D printer, then shipped to the
designer. It's similar to Child's Own, the
drawing-to-plushie service, but uses the actual drawn details from
the original artwork in the prints.

CrayonCreatures' process for transforming 2D sketches into 3D
prints starts with outlining the drawings, then using CAD tools
they "inflate it like a balloon," apply pressure physics to round
out the shapes, and export the file for 3D printing. "I feel
CrayonCreatures is a 3D printing application where the value is not
on the fabrication process itself but in the service that it
provides," says Cuni. "Often some 3D printed objects and projects
rely on the technological 'wow' factor of 3D printing, and I try to
avoid that."

There are some limitations to what kinds of drawings can be
printed, but Cuni promises that workarounds can be found, even if a
parent is raising a budding abstract expressionist. "Some things
like thin walls and spiky shapes are not welcome because the object
might collapse once it comes out from the printer," he says. "I
make the 3D models as accurate to the original drawing as possible,
and in some cases, if the character has super thin legs or hair, I
have to make a blob around it in order to make it printable."

The printouts aren't as expensive as most commissioned statues,
but still cost more than most figurines; each four-inch figurine is
$150 - $130 (£93 - £80) for printing and $20 (£12) more for
shipping to the US.

Beyond CrayonCreatures, Cuni is also exploring the intersection
of toys and cutting edge fab technology through his "Jana" series,
applying various images onto a plastic 3D printout of a small teddy
bear, based on scans of a five year old girl's doll. "The idea
behind the Jana series is the 'editing' capability of the digital
environment," Says Cuni. "We have became very familiar editing our
digital things -- from formatting a text in a word processing
software to applying filters to our photos. So, when thinking
that stuff will become digital as well, I thought about how
plugins/effects/filters for the real objects might look."

Cuni has used a simple teddy bear form as way to experiment with
digital patterns, textures, and data from the real world. He's
superimposed a Google
Map of Hong Kong on one, made another look like a sea
urchin, and explored a variety of other sculptural techniques
which are available at Shapeways.

While many still dismiss 3D printers as toys, Cuni is using his
Jana series to explore a bigger vision. His goal is to capture an
object in the real world through digital means, apply filters to
the CAD model, and return it to the world in a process he dubs "The
Instagram of Things."